Fledgling

SUMMARY: Before the fateful meeting in which Raziel unveils his wings, Kain muses on the past and the future – about what he has made and what cannot be unmade. One-shot.

Darkness fell over my territory. From the promontory on which I stood, in the last weak glow of the sun, I saw the first of them picking their way across the mountains that bordered the heartland of Nosgoth. Dumah and Turel. Neither had to check their footing as they leapt between outcrops of rock along the familiar route. The others would not be far off, but save for one, their presence barely mattered on this occasion. I looked beyond the mountains to the horizon. As ever, the view of those more distant territories was lost in a thick grey mist that even my evolved sight could not penetrate. Today, however, I would prove that my authority far exceeded what my eyes could or could not see. Today I would play my last hand against fate. What would seem at first a petty act of violence designed to set a forbidding example for the rest of my brood would stand eternally as an act of defiance so audacious that the forces it was intended to disturb would never recover. Let no creature, be he vampire, demon, deity or mortal slave, doubt after this day that my power reaches through time as well as space, even when I am not the free agent who conveys that power.

I felt my jaw set in anxious anticipation as I gazed back down at my approaching servants. I could now distinguish Melchiah and Zephon a little way behind their brothers, the first moving at a lumbering yet sure-footed pace, the other scurrying so low to the ground that at times he came close to walking on all fours, his limbs curiously splayed. From these small idiosyncrasies I remarked how firmly each of my 'sons' was now bound to his future path, every one already in thrall to a separate yet equally awesome and horrid destiny. And yet, I thought, as I saw the figure I had been waiting for all along appear at the crest of the first mountain, the greatest horror of all was not reserved for them.

Neither I nor my other lieutenants had seen Raziel for the best part of a year. He had in fact vanished completely, yet the Razielim territory remained strong and secure. Despite the most thorough investigation, exactly why or where he had hidden himself away was a mystery – and now, finally, he had re-emerged. He was walking at an oddly measured pace, the deliberate slowness of his steps making the restless energy that lay behind them all the more obvious. Had I known better then, I would not have been so quick to laugh off my observation that he looked about ready to take off.

Turel and Dumah were almost at the pillars now. I quieted my mind and prepared to transport myself there. I became conscious of a sudden loss of mass as my flesh evaporated into smoke, and then that consciousness slipped away altogether. When my mind returned I was standing at the centre of the desecrated pillars, facing my throne. Balanced across it was the Reaver. I took it up with reverential gentleness and felt the familiar distribution of its weight in my hands. Smiling to myself, I marvelled as I always did at how a weapon created so many millennia before still looked as if it were newly forged. Even whilst everything around it decayed as a result of my original transgression, its twisted blade remained forever gleaming and untarnished. The Reaver knew no time.

However, I would not be using it for this particular deed. Instead I looked to my hands, each with three flexible talons that tapered into needle-sharp points. Unconsciously, my grip tightened on the handle of the Reaver. The frustration I had initially felt when I heard Raziel was missing came flooding back. I had kept no information or advantages from Raziel save for whatever I knew was necessary to maintaining my own authority. Through his formation and guardianship of his own clan, I granted first him and then the others of my progeny autonomy without any fear that they would turn this power against me. I realised that something of this fear had begun to settle at the back of my mind. I permitted my 'sons' freedom, but secrecy was not part of the deal. It struck me then how reminiscent the whole thing was of earlier periods of evolutionary hibernation. My resolve hardened.

At that moment, an unexpected image came back to me. It was the last look Raziel had given me before he disappeared. We had met privately at the pillars to discuss the small matter of a human uprising in his territory. Through the entire conversation, Raziel had made a strong but nevertheless transparent act of being seriously concerned by the whole business. Reassuring him that a few men who'd rediscovered their fathers' old swords were no more like the vampire slayers of old when they wielded these crude weapons than they were before they knew of this hidden armoury, I placed my hand on his shoulder. His stance remained steady, but something within him seemed to recoil from me.

'What is the matter? I would expect one of your weaker brothers to seek my counsel still on a trifling matter like this, but not you. What are you truly worried about?'

He paused and began again. 'You don't understand, Kain. My clan has never been faced with a threat like this latest wave of-'

'Abandon this pointless charade, Raziel. If there's something I need to know about, it would be better if you told me directly. I do not find this waste of my time amusing.'

'I…' He glanced away, tight-lipped. Under my hand, I felt his back tense up in a strangely involuntary motion.

'I made you, child,' I snarled, fastening my claws around his shoulder. 'Don't think that I cannot read your moods. I will have this thing out sooner or later.'

He turned to face me again. I had never seen that look on his face before. He was clearly anxious, but there was a clear hint of resentment and even aggression in his eyes and bared fangs. The strange expression threw the rest of his appearance into relief. I suddenly saw how ragged, exhausted and old he looked. His whole body was bowed over, and the clan banner that usually hung so neatly and regally from his right shoulder was clumsily slung across his back. I backed away, removing my hand from his arm. As my touch left him, his expression seemed to open up into one of chilling despair, as if he were silently pleading with me for a reason as yet unclear even to him. He left without another word.

Was this betrayal?

Presently, I saw Turel and Dumah approach. They kneeled reverently before me with a shared murmur of 'My lord.' I greeted them and bid them stand up again. Noticing how both glanced nervously at the Reaver as they raised their heads, I replaced it on the throne. They visibly relaxed. Their apprehension restored to me some of the confidence I had felt diminish within me as I remembered my last meeting with Raziel. As it turns out, fear and respect are not so different after all.

'Assume your usual stations. I have seen your bretheren approach. They will all arrive shortly.'

Dumah's eyes widened slightly. 'Even-?'

'Apparently so.' As I spoke, my expression was carefully composed to ensure that they knew I would not accept any further questions.

As they walked some way off to the positions they usually occupied during these meetings, I returned to my thoughts. I wondered for the first time if, by filling my nest with vipers, I had left myself vulnerable to whatever venom remained in their fangs. It is one thing to acknowledge that vampires are no longer born, and another to reconcile what they have become with what they once were.

My memory crosses over a thousand years as if I were only thinking back to yesterday. Humans know so little of time that it amazes me how they can claim to have authority over history. As I began to appreciate eternity as a thing lived rather than a remote and abstract concept, I realised that the human life is no life at all. Petty distinctions of class and circumstance, such as my own birth into a noble family, and the apparent differences in quality of living that they create have no bearing on this fact. As soon as a human life blossoms it begins to fade away: what happens in between is of no consequence when one has grasped the indifference of time as a whole to such minute comings and goings.

The final insult, I mused as I penetrated further into the Sarafan tomb, is that one of the human race's most remarkable and – for the vampire's sake – convenient gifts, its ability to construct magnificent edifices like this that offered shelter from the elements, had created structures which would always far outlive both them and whatever pretensions of their own grandeur they attached to those buildings. Yet as Nosgoth came to resemble more and more the state of the pillars, the buildings themselves were beginning to appear just as transient. Five hundred years or so more, and these structures would probably crumble into the same dust that spawned and finally reclaimed their architects, if they weren't torn down first by whatever massive violence would inevitably consume Nosgoth beforehand.

Finally I broke into the heart of the tomb and found what I was looking for – or at least what was left of it. As I lifted one corner of the first casket's heavy stone lid, fresh air slipped through the broken seal for the first time in centuries and reduced the desiccated organic matter inside to a pile of dust. It did not matter; I had all I needed to identify that this was the quarry I sought. The dust lay inside a suit of armour marked with the insignia of the priesthood and the individual who had worn it. I would start with this one and work through the others in the ranks that they were assigned in life: a satisfying procedure because it was strategic, yet also because it made the crime that bit more perfect. Not only would I have turned these men into the very thing they had fought to destroy, but they would also remain a grisly parody of their past selves and their previous hierarchy, this time under my control.

Once I had removed the lid completely from the first coffin, I retraced my passage through the outer rooms of the tomb until I found the group of humans I had captured and brought along for the task of reviving the Sarafan. I had dragged some twenty of them, captured in a nearby village, to this place over the course of several days. Their legs and wrists were chained together and they lay slumped against a wall in a heap, shivering and whimpering among themselves. I pulled the first man in the queue to his feet, which to my annoyance set him babbling madly.

'For the love of God, just end it here!' he groaned. His eyes rolled in his head, drunk with exhaustion. 'What perverse whim do you satisfy dragging us the length of the country before you slice our throats! Why- hgggh!'

He crumpled to the ground again, winded by a quick knee to the stomach. The captives immediately behind him wailed in terror.

'Silence!' I dragged the man up again and signalled the rest to stand. 'I swear if any one of you forces me to draw your life's blood before it's time, I'll leave your leaking body for the wolves to find. And believe me,' I snarled, 'Having experienced for myself the savage violence and hunger of the wolf, the end I've planned for you is far more merciful.'

The warning had its desired effect: the gaggle immediately fell quiet. I took the chain between the first man's wrists with one hand and led the queue to the central room. The man behind me grunted as he regained his breath and looked up at the ceiling. His gaze fixed on the distinctive banners hanging from the eaves. I knew these humans could not all be so simple and ignorant of their own history that they would completely fail to recognise the emblems dyed on the cloth.

'What is this place?' he croaked.

We reached the chamber where the Sarafan had been laid to rest, and I thrust the group over to the far wall. A few of the women leant heavily on the stone. As they sank to the ground the people chained behind and in front of them began to sag downwards with the pull of their linked chains.

'Stay on your feet!' I slipped a slim blade from its sheath at my hip and inspected the sharpness of its edge. Without looking over at the humans I continued to speak coolly. 'Do you presume that I intend to let you live for so much longer that you have need to rest now? We have arrived at our destination. You'll have all the time in the world to rest soon enough.'

I turned my back on them, remembering that even humans take it as a sign of weakness if they see their nemesis bleed. I turned the dagger's point towards myself and opened a deep cut along the inside of my arm from elbow to wrist. I untwisted my arm and let it hang above the opened coffin, loosing the dead vampiric blood that was now only useful for this one purpose. The dark viscous fluid dropped into the dust. Rather than remaining in an inert puddle on the surface, however, it began to permeate the entire heap. Satisfied after a few minutes that I had given enough of myself, I turned the arm upwards again and compressed the wound. Under my palm, I felt it rapidly heal over.

At first with almost imperceptible slowness, the grains of dust began to move, sliding over one another, marshalling and reshuffling themselves. As they began to find the edges of the body they had once occupied, they shifted faster and consolidated into smaller columns and protrusions which gradually became recognisable as bones. Where the head and hands lay visible outside the suit of armour, I noted the skeletal changes that marked the shift from human to vampire: the longer, sharper canine teeth, the peaking cartilage of each ear. The arrangement of the finger bones also diverged from the human mould, taking on a more broadly spaced appearance that in time would form the cloven claws of a senior vampire. The transformation which had seemed so obscene when I had undergone it myself now unfolded before me with stunning precision. Whereas I had been reborn through the comparatively straightforward transfiguration of a human body that had maintained its integrity in spite of being mortally wounded, what I saw here was the ruins of a body remembering and reanimating itself after the passage of a thousand years' decay. Witnessing the direct reversal that a few drops of my blood had triggered, I remarked to myself what a joke human mortality was.

Presently, muscle began to form out of dirt and bind itself to the bones, taking on a more natural colour. A map of blood vessels, as yet empty and glassy, emerged from under the armour and wove through the limbs and head. I imagined the core organs reforming beneath the metal breastplate, each part subtly adapted to its new requirements. No surgeon I, but I could tell from the shape and size of the ligaments about the mouth and the fleshy structures that extended from and through the gullet that these were the special modifications that my kind required in order to feed. In particular, I noted the curious hollow chamber that formed at the back of the throat and realised that this must play some part in extracting the high-pressure jet of blood that the vampire can draw from the weakened human body without so much as touching it. The fascinating details of the transformation itself momentarily overcame my anticipation of the end-product, and I felt as if the secrets of my own body and the perfection of its design – the beauty of this ancient predator – were being revealed to me even as an entirely distinct creature was coming into being.

As skin and other superficial tissues and fibres swept over the framework and sealed it off, I ceased recognising myself in the casket and instead perceived the resemblance between the finished body and one of the figures painted on the wall of the tomb. His features were sharp and his form sleekly muscled. His eyes were deep-set under lank black hair, and his face showed little sign of ageing, the skin sallow and bloodless yet soft, the mouth still full. My attention had returned to the cluster of humans that cowered some feet away, still unaware of what I had created in the deep crucible before me, when I heard a loud gasp and the coarse scraping of metal against stone. Animated by some strange instinct, I plunged my hand into the coffin and grasped the wrist of the waking creature. The impulse surprised me more than I can say. Virtually all other human and animal drives and passions waste away before the lone vampire's bloodlust, but I had not imagined what further changes might accompany the creation of fledglings. What I felt could not be described as anything so straightforward as compassion, but it was undeniably a kind of bond.

'Raziel.'

The vampire lurched upwards, hooking his elbows over the edges of the coffin. Screams erupted among the humans at the far side of the room and they jostled to get further away from us. Wide golden eyes fixed on mine, but they were oddly empty and unseeing. I briefly feared that something had gone wrong, but then I remembered that I too had felt disorientated and wild when I first awoke into my new life. The searching, feral look in the creature's eyes was not madness, but hunger. I gestured with a movement of my head towards the cowering prey and the vampire followed the line of my gaze.

'Just when I thought your kind could commit no greater sin…'

It was the first man in the chained queue again. He stepped forward, having now apparently placed the nature of the insignia and paintings that decorated the tomb's walls.

'There cannot be a divine punishment dreadful enough to match this blasphemy! To defile an ancient priesthood-'

'Blasphemy!' I laughed. 'You lecture one of the new gods of this world about blasphemy! You, who would confuse the Sarafan's brief and violent political agenda with a holy purpose? Seeing as you have clearly longed all your wretched life for a divine revelation, let me provide you with one. The Sarafan's so-called spirituality was a farce. If you want to know the true "divine" passion that motivated their campaign, you need look no further than the same impulse that drives them now.'

I stepped aside to let the first of my brood slide from the coffin. The man stood frozen to the spot, transfixed by the vampire's stare as the creature clawed towards him. I heard the breath catch sharply in his throat. A familiar stillness seized the air. The man's flesh blanched then flushed vividly, as if his blood were boiling directly beneath his skin. The surface veins of his arms and face stiffened and protruded and his body was shaken by a powerful spasm that seemed to work up from his abdomen to his throat. In the next moment an arterial spray burst from his mouth, quickly joined by other channels of blood that jetted out of the other orifices of his face and finally burst from wounds in his chest and neck, newly torn open by the pressure of the blood that coursed through him. The red collected in an airborne stream that shot into the vampire's open mouth. It was over in seconds. The bloodless body toppled to the ground. The sudden dead weight at the front of the queue pulled the rest of the chained group down. They scrabbled at the walls and floor more desperately than ever in an attempt to escape, or at least to hide behind one another and postpone the inevitable a few minutes longer.

Raziel got to his feet. He passed the back of his fingers over his cheek and inspected the blood on his hand, before wiping his face clean in an amusingly fastidious gesture. He looked first at the slumped remains of the man he had killed and then at me. His eyes glowed with a new knowledge.

'Indulge your gift, Raziel.'

And feel honoured. As the first of my fledglings, you will never know hunger like this again.

Author's note: Or will he? WOOOooooOOOOO.

I wish I could say the main pleasure in writing a Legacy of Kain fic lies in revisiting one of my all-time favourite game franchises, but really I just found writing in its olde worlde purple prose good campy fun. I knew about the whole blood-drinking thing, but I didn't realise it was obligatory for all vampires to devour a copy of the OED. Teehee

Okay, so this fic is a bit all over the place. I know I've taken some shameless liberties with stuff like the appearance of the Sarafan tomb, but screw it; I never did like the design of that place in SR1. I haven't played the games in years (and even then I've only played the first Blood Omen and Soul Reaver 1 and 2 back when they were first released, though I did bother to extend my research a bit for this fic), so I'll readily admit that my grasp of franchise continuity, especially who knows what when and who has met who at what point in time, is probably about as strong as, well, that of Blood Omen 2 (apparently, lulz).

Thanks in advance for any reviews, comments, etc.